Ayn Rand to blame for the crisis?

Newsweek magazine interviewed Ayn Rand Institute director Yaron Brook, proceeding with the questioning on the premise that former Rand protege Alan Greenspan was trying to implement Objectivist ideology and that it's a given that "[l]ack of regulation is being blamed for our current crisis, and free markets are in disrepute." Blamed -- by whom? In disrepute -- amongst whom?

What do the economists say about this? Even taking your standard left-liberal economist, like 2008 Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, are you going to see such an economist blame "the free market"? Yes, free markets do appear to be in greater disrepute in public opinion right now, but what good reason is there to think that free markets should be in disrepute? What reason is there to think they are to blame for this crisis? I like to think of myself as reality-oriented and "pragmatic" in that sense as anyone, so I don't have some ideological stake in never allowing that free markets could be a problem no matter what the evidence, but what is the evidence here? This is why I say we should ask the economists and see what they say, and as far as I can tell they can give you any number of narratives about the crisis, few of which are about free markets failing. They might tell you that it was a failure of regulation, with the understanding that any market requires some kind of legal-regulatory framework. My understanding of the likes of Krugman is that they think markets are great and that they work but that politics also can be a distorting factor: lots of politically-connected people in our financial institutions found a way to game a risk-ridden system and get bailed out when the downside hit. Does that sound like a "free market"?

I suppose I should no longer be surprised at the intellectual laziness that passes for journalism. I would not mind seeing a debate about the merits of the free market as long as the terms of the debate itself are not loaded against it.

Gay marriage, for and against

Let's say that you wanted to use X for a purpose other than that which X was intended, but weren't allowed to do so. Are you missing out on not being able to use X?

In trying to reconstruct the argument against legal recognition of gay marriage in the most reasonable-sounding terms that I can, this is what I think it comes to. I do think that many of those who are opposed to gay marriage are doing so on the basis of views that are inextricably intertwined with inarguable religious dogma. I don't want to focus on those views here, as there is nothing to say other than that they are beyond reasonable argument. I want to focus on the arguments that make at least the pretense to persuading the skeptical.

There is a sort of fundamental philosophical opposition at work here that has to do with what our political institutions are supposed to express. One view is associated with modern liberalism: that the state should be a neutral party regarding the kinds of values and purposes to which people put their exercise of free capacities. The other view says that the state should reflect teleological (goal-based, purposive) aims. This latter is a more "conservative" offshoot of ancient Aristotelian ideas that a polity should be ordered for the sake of a telos. Modern liberal views reject this interpretation, saying that the good is up to individuals to discover and that the state should concern itself with matters of right and justice that are goal-independent. For instance, the modern liberal view would say that equality under the law should not be made subservient to other considerations, such as goal-based arguments for inequality.

Now, the "conservative" idea here, as applied to marriage, says that marriage was instituted (assuming we're dealing with reasonable secularists, let's say the institution of marriage is something that evolved as human history unfolded) for the sake of achieving certain goals. Such goals are usually construed in terms of the raising of children, the promotion or consecration of monogamous relationships, or perhaps social stability. So, when we see gay and lesbian people coming along and say that they also want to take part in an institution that was instituted for other purposes, this might strike the opponents of gay marriage as a little weird, if it weren't for the a-teleological moral decadence of the liberals. How can gays and lesbians say that they are being excluded and marginalized from a practice that was instituted for different and unrelated purposes?

As best as I can muster, this is my reconstruction of the "best" argument against gay marriage as I understand it. But it is still glaringly weak.

There are two glaring points of weakness:

(1) The problem of legal equality
(2) The problem of timeless, non-evolved telos

Regarding (1), considerations of legal equality should trump the arguments against gay marriage. It is quite irrelevant to this what the intended purpose of legal recognition of marriage might have been. With legal equality, the state is supposed to be blind to questions of gender in determining whether or how the law should apply. The question here is whether two consenting adults, irrespective of gender, race, religion, etc., can enter into a legally binding contract. As it is, without state recognition of such contracts between those of the same gender, there are real, substantive differences in how people are treated under the law. There are rights that they cannot exercise that others similarly and relevantly situated are able to. Irrespective of the alleged purpose of marriage, there are relevant legal rights that all responsible adults should be able to exercise. This is all that the argument for legally-recognized gay marriages come to.

Regarding (2), there are more deep-seated philosophical problems here, but the main one is that, whether or not there are things that are (for all practical intents and purposes) timeless and fixed with respect to a human good, there are also plenty of things about humanity that are not timeless and fixed. The contours of proper social organization are not going to be the same across time. (Once again, I reiterate that I am assuming a reasonable opponent who accepts ideas of evolution over time and not some eternal revealed dogma.) As human cultures or societies evolve, there are things that seemed weird to an earlier society that look quite normal to a later one. With evolution there are institutions that form out of and can be productive of unintended consequences. If marriage had been intended for some purpose at one point, it does not mean that other things cannot fall out of that in virtue of considerations such as legal equality. The institution of marriage can evolve into an institution the defining feature of which is certain legal rights and relationships between consenting adults. While I have the profoundest respect for Aristotle, his Platonic-holdover views about eternal telos are flawed and if we are to advance Aristotelian-inspired ideas in modern times we need to drop ancient interpretations of form, teleology, etc.

If there is an argument against gay marriage that successfully trumps these considerations, I do not know what it is. I think that there comes a time that we need to simply face up to the reality that certain arguments or positions are quite devoid of intellectual merit, and this is one of those times.

Interests

As I turn a critical eye to it, one bit of an oddity in my published article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is that the only reference I make to what Rand herself had to say is a footnote about Elsworth Toohey, who was an advocate of selflessness (and an ideological mirror of actual totalitarians murdering millions of people as The Fountainhead was going to print). Perhaps it is a minor shortcoming of my article that I use a quotation from Leonard Peikoff about the role of interests in morality, rather than a quotation from Rand herself. Peikoff made a strong point as it was, but there was a quotation from Rand that might have amplified or complemented it:

There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see “The Objectivist Ethics”).
“Introduction,” The Virtue of Selfishness, ix.

Here's the point of the quotation from Peikoff as well as the above from Rand, taken together: What one sees to be in one's interests and what is actually in one's interest are distinct in meaning. Further, doing something that is motivated by what one sees to be in one's interests does not thereby justify that action. Something's being in one's interests is a component of proper moral motivation. Actually, the claim is stronger than that: it is essential to proper motivation, i.e., it is not merely some component that we might somehow separate.

Let's say that Rand had said that it was in one's interests to rob others, but that such an action failed to meet other component-standards for proper motivation, so therefore could not be justified in any event. For one thing, while that might make a certain amount of sense, it would mean that Rand was not an egoist by any good understanding of the term. For another, she did not perpetuate a dichotomy between what is in one's interests and what is a proper moral motivation. She presented a new concept of egoism by reconceptualizing what one's interests are. For any person who is motivated by rational and moral concerns, such a person will not find it in his or her interests to do things like rob others. To take such a rational and moral perspective, one adopts a mentality that goes back to the Greeks, where moral motivation was meaningfully defined in self-interested terms while rejecting the Ring of Gyges model of rationality. (An aside: Plato's rejection of that model was part and parcel of his embrace of a different metaphysics in which the particular, ephemeral "self" was not the "true" eternal and universal self. I don't see the alternative as having to be between Plato and the Ring of Gyges; I think we can develop a coherent neo-Aristotelian conception of normative rationality.)

Rand's proposed alternative in this context was between self-interest (properly conceptualized) and selflessness. As the Western world of her day was being engulfed by totalitarian ideology that enshrined selfless service to a collective as the highest of virtues, she had to mark out the "extreme" opposition as being the one actually at the root of Western morality, i.e., individualism and respect for the dignity of individual lives. I think that failure to recognize Rand's context here means a failure to recognize her project and her role in reshaping the Western moral landscape. She is still ill-recognized to this day in the mainstream, being (ridiculously) faulted as being a major engine for a mentality that led to our current economic and political woes. This is a sign that the intellectual mainstream is still broken and ill-equipped to evaluate ideas.

[As a sort of addendum here, I'd like to turn a critical and non-partisan eye towards the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies itself, a necessary and healthy means of airing dissent about what could and should be a better publication. A few years back, JARS invited a totalitarian-collectivist intellectual sleaze, Slavoj Zizek, to contribute an article belittling and interpreting Rand in bizarre and salacious quasi-postmodernistic ways. Not only is his whole metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics of the same sort as of the leftist "intellectuals" Rand depicted in her novels, it's apparent that he's a willing self-parody, which prompts the question that needs to be asked whenever we have to ask if something is a parody: should it be taken seriously? (The thing that should be taken seriously is the fact that a good number of people take it seriously.) This prompts the question of what is going on at JARS that would lead to someone like Zizek being published there. There are credible pieces like mine published there, and then there is the one from a leftist totalitarian "celebrity" and parody-equivalent. Rand studies deserve better than this. I understand the well-intentioned effort to create a forum even for controversial criticism and interpretation, but what gets kept out if Zizek gets in? How do we differentiate Zizek's trolling from the Sokal hoax? This and other factors make me quite lukewarm, to say the least, about the idea of publishing there again. I'd like to be able to know that a published forum I contribute to isn't serving as a platform for allegedly "respectable" jokers who so "fashionably" defile Rand's ideas. ("Dismayed" emoticon needed here.)]

"We must kill all the economists"

This article by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa made the rounds at reddit.com, stating in its headline, "When inclusion costs and ostracism pays, ostracism still hurts." It is based on a study that showed that even when people were given monetary benefits associated with being left out of a group, that they would forego the monetary benefits to being included. The article concludes:

Microeconomic theory, or any other theory of human behavior which assumes that human behavior is rational and based on carefully calculated cost-benefit analysis, cannot explain van Beest and Williams’ remarkable findings that humans are happy to lose money and sad to make money. Without the Savanna Principle, it would be difficult to explain why ostracism makes people sad when it pays. This is one of the many reasons why evolutionary psychology is superior to microeconomics as a theory of human behavior (even when we are not talking about sex differences) and why we must kill all the economists.

This is a strange conclusion, one in which someone in the psychological profession is willing to tread on the economics profession. I have the impression (I don't want to tread here myself; I'm stating an impression) that the psychological community is overrun by scientistic impulses: it is highly empirical in its methodologies and conclusions. Whether or not we have sound underlying theories about human behavior, it seems considerable import is placed on the "cash value" of our investigations.

The "cash value" here is assumed to be that people are observed as a matter of fact to prefer group-inclusion to money.

But how does that nullify economic theory?

Since when does economic theory define cost and benefit in terms of monetary cost and benefit? Having studied a bit of economics myself, my understanding was (irrespective of what empirical cash-value we might be able to derive from it) that humans have ends and that economizing behavior is effort at being instrumentally rational and efficient in employing the means to attain those ends. There is nothing here that implies that everyone's economic motivations are going to be monetary ones. It doesn't even imply that everything else being equal ("ceteris paribus") more money is preferable to less money; that would not fit the model for someone whose ends consist in rejecting the pursuit of money. And we need to take into account people's moral motivations which are not economic (at least not straightforwardly economic; and if economics claims to say something universal about human motivation, all behavior -- even morally-motivated behavior -- is "tautologically" economic in the sense that people implicitly have being moral as an end and engage in whatever actions necessary to be moral).

Moreover, what economists out there are even saying that people's motivations are typically monetary-economic? Such a view would have cash-value if there were studies out there that purported to even show that, but as far as I am aware there are not any such studies and such a view doesn't even accord with our understanding of human motivation.

In sum, how does any of this make evolutionary psychology "superior" to economics as a theory of human behavior?

It might well be that evolutionary psychology gives us more actual content about the way people actually behave and that economics is quite limited in what it can tell us. One of the problems I've been making clear I have with the economics profession is how little it seems to be able to tell us, particularly on such important questions as whether the government should be spending a significant portion of one year's worth of GDP to "rescue" financial institutions. But at least we can say that economics proper does not overreach in the claims it can make. We want to be sure the sciences do not make overreaching claims of their own. They are great at providing facts and studies, but we need more to have a proper understanding.

For example, I brought up the moral angle. Do the sciences give us a moral perspective? Say that this study in ostracism changed the parameters such that one's options were to participate in a collective endeavor that was also evil, or to exercise one's moral judgment and refuse to participate. Does ostracism hurt there? There may be hurt, but the hurt may not be from the ostracism per se. It may be a hurt that stems from the collective endeavor being so morally objectionable and seeing one's fellow humans participating. Evolutionary psychology may go quite a way in describing how human beings often tend to behave, but we also know that people can be critically rational in regard to behaviors and institutions.

So perhaps the "problem" with economics proper is that, like morality, it is not scientistic enough?

The anti-"gay agenda" agenda

This article about the right-wing opposition to gay adoption is troubling, though not surprising. Its author, Steve Chapman, concludes:

The Florida ban is simple and stark. It says, in effect, that a child may not be adopted by gay even when the adoption is in the best interest of the child. That's the main reason the court overturned it: It violates the rights of children and "causes harm to the children it is meant to protect."

Those who want to keep gays from adopting think that's a small price to pay for blocking the "homosexual agenda." But then, they're not the ones who will be paying it.

It seems that even though the available facts and studies suggest that children do just as well being raised by gay couples as by straight couples, and almost certainly better than not having parents to be raised by, these facts do not the anti-gay-adoption crowd. It looks as if they plowed ahead with their proposition to outlaw adoptions by gays as if they didn't even care what the facts say. I can restate the problem differently: What if there are facts that show their agenda to be thoroughly misguided? Would it even matter then?

If one wants a fact-value dichotomy in action, it is hard to imagine one more glaring than this in today's politics. It should prompt anyone to ask: what facts are such anti-gay propositions as the Florida one based one? And shouldn't this raise questions why the right-wingers would put "stopping the gay agenda" ahead of the welfare of children?

Where is the "stern disapproval" emoticon when you need it?

Fighting partisanship

One thing I really appreciate about Greenwald and Sullivan's blogs is their willingness to criticize politicians and media people from both sides. This is a necessary and healthy part of a polity that actually cares about truth and good policy. It is necessary to keep a check on people and leaders who may be otherwise well-intentioned but lapse into faulty tendencies. Recently, for instance, Greenwald took Time's Joe Klein to task for Klein's own revisionism about George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" photo. Watching this was somewhat discomforting, seeing as I had developed a considerable amount of respect for Klein's journalism. And, sure enough, both Greenwald and Sullivan are more than willing to keep a critical eye on Obama in the coming months and years.

There is something about this critical eye that is indeed discomforting for committed partisans. If one has a view that those "one's own side" is basically good and those on "the other side" are not, one is almost surely going to be unrealistic about one's own people and leaders as well as those of the other side; one is going to criticize the other side's people and leaders in ways that one would distrust severely if directed at one's own. In reality, it rarely works out that one's side is free of problems while the other side is ridden with them. Part of the problem here is a team-mentality; the likes of Greenwald and Sullivan do not identify with a "team" and so have a sort of luxury of not having to answer for the problems and foibles of those with whom they have decided not to align.

I do think of partisanship as damaging to one's own cause, because it involves complict toleration of certain things that undercut and undermine the strength and credibility of the cause. By blinding oneself to the foxes in one's own henhouse, one will undermine the integrity and safety of the henhouse. Rather than distrust and ostracize critics even in one's own midst, it is in one's interests to address them head-on. The same goes for addressing responses to one's own criticisms of the other side.

(There is a point at which the give-and-take of criticism and response doesn't yield anything but a negative estimation of some group or party -- e.g., of the Nazi Party in Germany. My remarks here apply to cases that fall short of that -- indeed, are differences in kind and not degree.)

If one embraces a mentality of objective criticism and response -- and, hence, of rarely aligning with or opposing some group or faction (at least in any long-term sense aside from joining a temporary coalition) -- one doesn't see criticism of people one might otherwise respect as a threat; rather, it becomes second nature. One even comes to welcome reasoned response to and criticism of one's own ideas and views. It is important to anyone that is seeking to have a check on one's own reasoning, such as to identify weaknesses or problems that one might not otherwise have recognized.

A significant part of this healthy mentality is to make an effort to get into someone else's shoes and see things from their perspective.

I see the Republicans' intellectual culture today as one consumed by partisanship, and I think there are pieces of advice that they should take to heart. For those who are still attached to reality enough to be swayed, there is such advice as:

- Welcome criticism from within one's own ranks
- Try to see things from critics' and opponents' perspective
- Make an effort to acknowledge the opponent's strengths (professional sports teams have to do this to know how best to prepare for contests!)
- Imagine your reaction if your opponents said or did things comparable to what your side has said or done

I think that if Republicans could take this advice to heart, they would not have much difficulty understanding why people -- left, right, and center -- are so critical of their M.O. as of late. Imagine the reaction of Republicans if the Democrats had been running an elder presidential candidate and selected a vice presidential candidate of Palin's caliber. The accusations would not have been pretty. And the accusations about Obama were not pretty as it was.

What the Republicans have done is to support all-too-uncritically a president that is leaving the office a very-unpopular one, and who has significantly damaged the party's national electoral situation. Rather than act all-too-defensively about their latest series of electoral choices, they should welcome and want to identify and root out their own weaknesses. They can start by taking the criticisms of their vice-presidential nominee a lot more seriously.

Rights, and right-and-wrong

There are distinct levels of rightness and wrongness at which we can judge certain actions. To vandalize someone's property, for example, is to engage in a violation of their rights. Those who commit such actions should be prosecuted and punished under the law.

Vandalism is what occurred recently to buildings of Latter Day Saints churches in the wake of its massive monetary support for Proposition 8.

While, as I've stated, this is a violation of the Church's property rights, there is another part of me that says, "Serves them right." The church engaged in reprehensible behavior that brought on this kind of behavior. In that regard, I see little cause for complaint from the Church other than the legal one. The Church's acts to help deprive people of their equal legal rights under the law, being legal efforts and an expression of their First Amendment rights or not, had their own victims, their own usurpations and trespasses in violations of moral rights. Whatever did the gay people in California ever do to "have it coming" to them?

The people who vandalized are also guilty of wrongdoing, not just in terms of violating property rights, but in terms of substituting credible methods for criminal ones.

So we have two sides here, both engaging in immoral behaviors. And both are deserving of moral condemnation, not just one-sided outrage at what the other side has done. How much decency and consistency might we expect from each side, however? How much will either side's credibility be eaten up by partisanship?

Thinking like an economist

Sullivan quotes a New York Times piece:

One big worry stifling activity in the markets is that if the government is doing so much lending and backstopping now, it's going to need to do a lot of borrowing, too, to finance those efforts. And if the government is seeking lenders to buy its debt, what is going to happen to other borrowers looking for lenders?

As the Federal Reserve and Treasury act to rescue borrowers, Simons said, ''they're starving other private sector borrowers.''

Sullivan adds:

And so the attempt to resolve the credit crunch also crunches credit.

I thought the whole problem, and the whole rationale for the "rescue package," was that, without the rescue there would be no private sector borrowing and lending to "crowd out." Isn't the whole aim to generate credit where there wouldn't have been credit before?

Are there any two economists out there who can agree on a narrative for what's going on with this bailout?

Ideology and pragmatism, Cont'd.

To continue on my previous entry regarding Greenwald, Greenwald writes:

It's possible to become too rigid and unyielding in one's ideological beliefs -- to adhere excessively to principles without regard to consequences -- but it's at least just as possible to become so pragmatic that one operates without any core principles. There's a perception (a dubious one) that the problem of the last eight years has been that our political leaders have been too rigidly ideological (I'd say the Bush administration was quite concerned with outcomes and not particularly concerned with principles). But this perception -- accurate or not -- has engendered an overcompensating desire to rid ourselves of ideology in the name of pragmatism.

The reason that the term "ideological" -- or better yet, "ideologue" -- has negative connotations is the reason Greenwald states at first: someone can become too rigid and unyielding in one's ideological beliefs. What that means, exactly, is that the ideologue shelters his beliefs from reality. We see this phenomenon in the writings of William Kristol, to name an example. There is no evidence that Kristol seems willing to accept as refuting his ideological preconceptions. In a hugely significant way, this is very unprincipled. Some facts he'll accept into consideration, others he won't, depending on how well the fact supports his ideological preconception. There is no principle one can locate in Kristol's writings other than: what can best strategically advance the GOP's agenda? The problem with this is that Kristol's strategery has proven so bad in generating success for the GOP.

So, folks like Kristol or those driving the Bush administration's policies (and that includes Kristol) combine the worst of both worlds. And that is not hard to accomplish. If someone has a screwed-up ideology and interprets all the "good results" that the ideology is supposed to have produced through the lens of that ideology, you have both bad ideology and bad results. That's how it makes sense for the Bush Administration to have been so results-focused, as Greenwald observes, while being rigidly ideological. This is just how low the GOP has sunk intellectually.

The result: an anti-reality ideology that is not committed to principles that would rule out torture or hyping a case for war.

For those who understand that there is no valid dichotomy between ideology and practicality, none of this comes as any surprise at all.

For there to be no dichotomy between ideology and practicality, you need ideology -- principles -- that are reality-based.

The chief problem with the GOP right now is not, fundamentally, whether it is "too ideological" or "too pragmatic" but that it is not reality-based. The core and the leadership of the party right now is anti-reason and anti-reality, and that is why it has driven away the George Wills and the Andrew Sullivans. The remaining core is under the delusion that Bush is a good President (where else is he getting the remaining 20% approval ratings?) and that Palin is what they need for the future.

Ayn Rand would not have had the slightest trouble in figuring out the reason for the fundamental intellectual breakdown and present state of the GOP.

Ideology, pragmatism and competence

Greenwald raises a point I've wanted to clarify for a while. In my very second posting to this blog, regarding Barack Obama's qualities (10/26/2008), I wrote:

As with Supreme Court appointments, ideological litmus tests do not strike me as wise. We're not selecting someone to enact our vision of the world, but to exercise solid judgment in the face of real problems we have now. I see Obama simply as the better fit for that position. Unlike with the example set by Pres. Bush, I see him as having such a level of intelligence, work ethic and prudence to learn that a "leftward lurch" would probably be disastrous for him and his party's re-election chances, much less not in the country's best interests. It is amazing to see Obama's shrill opponents claiming he will lurch left given these factors.

So far, it looks like I called it pretty well: Obama's appointments so far have been quite moderate. But I want to clarify my remark about an "ideological litmus test": Ideology does matter, within an appropriate range. Someone could readily pull the "Hitler card" and ask whether Hitler would be an acceptable person for a leadership position as long as he was competent. I would have added "temperamental, prudent and pragmatic" to "competent," except that Hitler didn't demonstrate these other qualities, which rather demonstrates my point. Hitler demagogued and expressed ideological tenets that don't reflect these qualities. In other words, there can be ideological aspects of a candidate for a position that are beyond the pale for that job. Consider the context: we are dealing with political figures, after all, and politics is a rather dirty business as it is. So we are already "grading on a curve." And on that curve, I believe Obama rates pretty well. Someone like George W. Bush, knowing what we now know about him, is especially bad even by American-political standards: his policies on torture and hyping a case for war, in particular, put him beyond the pale even by already-dirty political standards. And his leadership was also incompetent. So good riddance to him.

Politics, in addition to being a normally dirty business, is also normally quite a pragmatic one. That's where Obama fits in quite well, despite his liberal ideology. Bush's departures from the norm in regard to torture and Iraq are actually quite radical in this context -- which wouldn't have been so bad had the ideas underlying those departures not been so bad. Obama displays a temperament that suggests that if he wants to make some bold moves in some direction, he also has solid political-pragmatic and minimally decent ideological bases for doing so. One thing he might try to do is to move toward universal health care, a move that -- while I'm most definitely skeptical of the government's ability to direct the nation's health care system (beyond how much it's doing so already) -- I don't consider ideologically "beyond the pale." It is a view that I know that reasonable and decent people support -- a difference in kind from the sorts of ideas that a Hitler would support.

There's a lot more to be said on all this, in due course. My point is, my specific ideological differences with Obama are not especially important to me in evaluating his qualities as a political figure. There are too many other factors that come into play, particularly the need for someone who promises a significant improvement over what we have now. Even in politics, a dirty business, there are differences that do matter.

[ADDENDUM: Greenwald headlines his article with the question: "Ideology vs. pragmatism: Is one more important than the other?" My answer: NO. They are both crucial and a properly-formed worldview doesn't even accept a dichotomy between the two. See: Damascus Sword.]

Sullivan's hate mail

As this comments section and others so far have shown, when you start talking bad about Palin, the reaction can get quite negative. Andrew Sullivan doesn't have Comments sections on his Daily Dish blog, but he does post his email address. I can only imagine the amount of hate mail he must have been getting these past few months, being that he's been the most visible critic of Palin on the blogosphere and perhaps anywhere in the media. How does he find the time to sort through it all? I'm guessing he has screeners or something.

Anyway, I'd like to comment on a phenomenon that I see a lot in politics: a decidedly partisan process of demonization that happens by those of one side against the other, especially against their respective leaders. It is any wonder that, after all that demonization, we can see McCain and Obama even so much as shaking hands at their debates, laughing at each others' comedy-roast jokes (see: Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner), and basically regarding one another as okay guys who have big disagreements on things.

What makes this process of demonization so interesting is that the partisans from each side can't seem to find anything good or nice to say about the other side or its leaders. If Obama is bright is charismatic, it is turned into a negative: "Hitler was charismatic, too."

Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, is not a partisan. He is willing to criticize people in both parties, and he is a conservative and Christian with libertarian leanings. (I've seen a video of him speaking at a CATO Institute event.) So when he gets as negative as he has about Palin, it's not because he's some Bush-Deranged, America-hating Loopy-Leftist. It's because he sees a party that's supposed to stand for some good things, degrading itself so badly and handing power over the Democrats on a silver platter.

Palin's not being cut out for the job she was seeking was not something coming just from the elitist left and the biased liberal media. Two of the most significant endorsements for Obama -- that from Colin Powell, and that from The Chicago Tribune (arguably the nation's leading conservative paper, and which hadn't endorsed a Democrat for President ever before Obama) -- made mention of that fact. George F. Will, David Brooks, David Frum and other conservative writers were making mention of it.

You would think some of that might sink in.

And, in the wider picture, this is not about Palin. This is about the pervasiveness of anti-reason, anti-intellectual discourse in our politics, coming in especially concentrated doses from the Right Wing.

If I wanted to demonize Palin in a biased and partisan way, I would in all likelihood not find anything good to say about her, much like the anti-Obama partisans can't seem to find a good thing to say about him. But I don't want to do that. In fact, I want to give Palin credit where credit is due on something. By all available reports, Palin has a history of involvement in religious fundamentalism. I think that does reflect on the way she is as a person, or on her worldview. However, her record of governing in Alaska has shown that, on such issues as abortion, gay rights, and creationism in school curricula, she has not let her fundamentalist ideas dictate her decisions. Like all facts, this one is a fact to take note of, and integrate into a fair and balanced (i.e., objective) picture of her. That's the basic gist of the following article from The L.A. Times:

"Palin treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy"

Enjoy!

Moral/practical unity: taxation

To help understand the context in which Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was written (1957), let's consider that at that time the top marginal income tax rate was 90 percent. In peacetime. And there were intellectuals running around looking for justifications for this. And the United States was trying to stake out a major area of difference with the Soviets. Rand devoted some dozen-plus pages of her novel to a story about a factory that operated on the principle, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." The days of such confiscatory taxation are hopefully over for good, and arguably Ayn Rand had no small part to play in seeing those tax rates come down from such insane levels.

I'm not going to get into the issue right now of whether any taxation is ever justified. What I do want to do is to stimulate some thinking about the relation between the morality and the practicality of taxation.

One can rather easily make the case that taxation at a rate of 90 percent is unacceptable just on moral grounds. It is not fair or right or just for anyone's earnings to be taxed that heavily. One might also make the case that, if such high taxation is not productive of good results, then it is not moral on that basis as well. This latter usually regards the morality of taxation in terms of its practicality. One might say, for example, that the empirical evidence suggesting that tax rate cuts by Kennedy and Reagan spurred faster economic growth is a good moral reason for supporting tax cuts.

What I want to do here is suggest something else. I think the moral and the practical should be understood as a unity. What I want to suggest is that the improved practical effects of tax cuts -- faster economic growth -- happens because cutting taxes from such levels is the morally right thing to do.

I think that recognize this point would require a re-orientation for a lot of people in how they conceptualize the relationship between the moral and the practical.

Think about what happens when you're legally compelled to turn over a portion of your marginal income to the state. You are given only a limited amount of assurance that the proceeds might be spent in a wise, prudent, fair, and benevolent sort of way. You already know that some of it is going to be squandered by bureaucrats and filtered to special interests, something that many say is just a necessary facet of getting things done in government (however wise and wonderful the intentions and outcomes). Now, let's say that 20 percent of your marginal earnings are going to go to feed into that system. Warren Buffett wouldn't mind such a marginal tax rate; after all, roads need to be built, science might benefit from some research funding, a structurally strong national defense sounds like a good idea, we like the idea of seniors having some medical security, and so on.

But now imagine that some 70 percent or more of your marginal earnings are going to feed that. What's moral about that? What's reasonable about it? What about it says, "Pay up, because it's your patriotic duty and you should help your fellow man"? What moral principle comes to the fore? Is it one that is going to encourage and reward quality work? Is it one that's going to make one proud to contribute to the betterment on one's society? Is it one that's going to make you feel all warm and fuzzy and lovey-dovey because you've learned to subordinate your selfish aims to greater harmony?

No, no it is not. It is one that says, "To hell with you, you make more, so you can afford to pay it."

Notice how the principle makes no distinction between those very independent entrepreneurial individuals who buck the system and innovate and create new lines of commerce and those who are well-connected with political scoundrels and legally thieve left and right from the general fund. Listening to some left-wing demagogues you might never know there was a difference.

Given these sorts of factors, I just don't find it any wonder that a really high progressive tax rate encourages stagnation. When you implement such immoral policies, what else do you expect?

I'll add that this is not limited to tax policy. Take a look at Bush's policies on torture and Iraq. He engaged in immoral things there, and they haven't been practical. I don't think that is any kind of accident.

Scientism over at Richarddawkins.net

I've been a bit busy in the past couple days over at the Richarddawkins.net forums, particularly in a thread I started titled, "Scientism." One can have a look here. I'm encountering quickly enough that there is something like a scientistic dogma rather widespread amongst Dawkins's followers. I find this unfortunate, because it weakens the case that they can make against the worse kinds of dogmatists on "the other side." All it does is foment a reaction against atheism, agnosticism or secularism as just another kind of dogma on roughly similar footing as the religious dogmas we all know and love.

Granted, it is a better kind of dogma than the religious dogma, since it is a dogma about empirical observables whereas the religious dogmas are not. At least there's some epistemic accountability in the former. But we need the best tools in the arsenal we can procure. Fighting dogma with another kind of dogma won't cut it. As I am now repeatedly pointing out to the Dawkinsians, it is reason, not science, that's fundamental. Humean empiricism and its contemporary scientistic manifestations are just impotent against those wanting to prop up a different, non-rational perspective. Has anyone noticed that Hume couldn't even justify a belief in causality much less anything else? Surely there are greater philosophical minds than he.

Sowell, the elites, and Palin

I like to think that Thomas Sowell is a cut above the standard intellectual figures we see on the Right -- the Limbaughs, the Coulters, the Kristols. I mean, when you go looking for what might be considered the best minds on the Right, Sowell has got to be right up there. It may depend on whom we decide to include on "The Right." Does Andrew Sullivan qualify? He's a self-styled conservative and libertarian at the same time and is rightly fed up with the Right as we know it. Anyway, when I think of living figures (the closest we have to heirs of Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Rand, Nozick) that currently exercise significant influence over the respectable Right in this country -- whatever it is that fuels a positive pro-free-market, pro-individual-responsibility, pro-moral-restraint, pro-achievement message that inspires Limbaugh's listeners -- Sowell comes to mind. Richard Epstein is another. (If we're talking figures with more influence amongst libertarians than conservatives, there are David Friedman and Randy Barnett.)

I've got a massive reading list at the moment and hardly getting to any of it. (Shouldn't I go and start with Plato's The Republic and work my way from there?) I've got Sowell and Epstein books sitting around, unread, but I want to delve into them. Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions, in particular, is alluring. I've read two Sowell books some time ago: Marxism: Philosophy and Economics, and A Conflict of Visions. The latter left more of a lasting impression, and I think I get where he's coming from when I see such titles of more recent books as Visions of the Anointed.

(Look, I grew up on these figures. My intellectually formative years had a definite "Rightist" [specifically, secular-libertarian] bias in what I read, admired and believed most. My current M.O. is to spread feelers across any number of spectra and see what else might make a lot of sense.)

During his career, Sowell has cultivated a healthy distrust of "cultural elites," which is close to a euphemism for "liberals." I'd like to think his main line of argument is reworked Hayekianism. As Sowell sees it, the intellectual elites of the left fashion themselves as more enlightened, progressive, nuanced, etc., and more capable of reworking society according to their superior visions. The problem is that we have sometimes -- well, perhaps often -- seen this work out disastrously in practice. The socialists, figured a century ago to be the more morally and intellectually enlightened bunch, decided their great moral intentions and advanced competence could lead to the betterment of society. It did not help much that the intellectual giant of that era was Karl Marx, who fueled utopian visions for a society whose time was ready to come. Mises figured out quite early on (though one could say too late to stop a rising tide) that the substance just wasn't there to deliver on this promise, and, just as he and Hayek predicted, the socialist experiments went bust. But the Enlightened Vision lives on.

The gist of Sowell's critique is that the Enlightened Vision faces stiff resistance from reality and, well, you don't want to mess with reality, because reality will win every time. But let's get more specific: Sowell is echoing the Hayekian argument about the pretense of being able to form a society according to a rational (read: rationalistic) vision. It doesn't matter how intelligent, enlightened or well-intentioned the leaders or their intellectual brethren may be. To effect change, you have to follow certain rules set by reality. If the elites don't take that reality to heart, so much the worse of the elites.

This is all fine and good, so far. But what this healthy distrust of elites does not justify, is a pathological distrust and populist backlash. And, here, I am disappointed to see Sowell fall prey to that in this past election. I hope it is only a lapse and blind spot, and not a sign of major decline.

The objective case against Palin for Vice President, based on the totality of the facts available, and intelligently integrated, is that she is far from the best candidate we could have had for the job. That's not an assessment coming from the left side of the partisan divide. It was one also coming from within the GOP's own ranks and from conservatives like Andrew Sullivan who are more than dismayed at the direction that the GOP has taken.

Meanwhile, Sowell distrusts Obama. He regards "the Obama phenomenon" as the product of a leftist Enlightened-Vision fantasy machine. Better to have someone in power who respects tradition and trusts the ordinary folk to go about their business and shape their institutions just fine. That would be a healthy attitude to take, up to a point. Sowell, however, has engaged in reactionary backlash, the kind which has the GOP sinking.

In response to the very-justified criticism of the Palin nomination, Sowell went into defense mode, and he doesn't do well. Offering what amounts to the "best" case anyone on the Right has come up in defense of the Palin nomination, Sowell writes:

The issue that is raised most often is her relative lack of experience and the fact that she would be “a heartbeat away from the presidency” if Sen. John McCain were elected. But Barack Obama has even less experience — none in an executive capacity — and his would itself be the heartbeat of the presidency if he were elected.

Sarah Palin’s record is on the record, while whole years of Barack Obama’s life are engulfed in fog, and he has had to explain away one after another of the astounding and vile people he has not merely “associated” with but has had political alliances with, and to whom he has directed the taxpayers’ money and other money.

Sarah Palin has had executive experience — and the White House is the executive branch of government. We don’t have to judge her by her rhetoric because she has a record.
...
Why then the enthusiasm for Obama and the hostility to Sarah Palin in the media?

One reason of course is that Senator Obama is ideologically much closer to the views of the media than is Gov. Palin. But there is more than that. There are other conservative politicians who do not evoke such anger, spite and hate.

Sarah Palin is the one real outsider among the four candidates for the presidency and vice presidency on the Republican and Democratic tickets. Her whole career has been spent outside the Washington Beltway.

More than that, her whole life has been outside the realm familiar to the intelligentsia of the media. She didn’t go to the big-name colleges and imbibe the heady atmosphere that leaves so many feeling that they are special folks. She doesn’t talk the way they talk or think the way they think.

Sowell then lowers himself to this piece of anti-epistemological craziness:

Sarah Palin will not be ready to become president of the United States on the first day that she and John McCain take office. Nobody is.
...
Whatever the shortcomings of John McCain and Sarah Palin, they are people whose values are the values of this nation, whose loyalty and dedication to this country’s fundamental institutions are beyond question because they have not spent decades working with people who hate America. Nor are they people whose judgments have been proved wrong consistently during decades of Beltway “experience.”

First off, "they hate America" is typical for anti-intellectual, gutter-level right-wing bile, not something we would expect from a measured intellectual. And what about that point about readiness? Is that what he has to reduce himself to? Just because "nobody is ready," does that mean we can't make relevant distinctions in degree or kind? I mean, "nobody is ready" to present a Grand Unified Theory in physics by the coming Jan. 20, but no one in their right mind suggests putting Palin in charge of doing that. So let's get some perspective here. Just how not-ready would Palin be, compared to Obama or McCain? Yes, answering this requires the cognitive tasks of differentiation and integration, basic building blocks of epistemology. Sowell fails miserably in this article at performing these tasks.

The nation had gotten to "know" Sarah Palin all of about two months prior to having to decide on whether to vote for her. In what sensible, plausible way do we say that "her record is on the record"? The moment people began peaking into that record, all kinds of legitimate questions arose. Just one example out of many: What legitimate substance was there to her claim that she said "Thanks but no thanks to that Bridge to Nowhere"? Un-spun by any of the partisan machines, what was there? The actual record was not reassuring.

Sowell goes on to tout "experience outside the Beltway" and the all-important "executive experience" that, allegedly, none of the other three candidates had. Really? McCain touted his having been a commander of the largest squadron in the Navy. Fine, that's admissible into the record, it shows that he has leadership experience. But a fair, non-partisan admission looks at what kinds of leadership experience Obama had as well. He exercised a kind of executive authority as president and Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Review, a significant publication in an important field. And, putting it in perspective, what does Palin's governorship of the state of Alaska signify? Does it signify as much as Ronald Reagan's having been governor of a much larger and more progressive state like California signified? It's the unprincipled right-wing partisans that want to start playing the comparison game even to Reagan, and demean Reagan in the process. That's what happens when they lower themselves like that; they reduce their own arguments to absurdity. This is just one point on which one can blast holes through the Palin apologetics.

The fact is, while we should be quite skeptical of the abilities of political leaders to effect changes for the good, it does make a difference whether we have someone in there who is the the most competent person for the job. Eight years of Bush should have taught us that.

Sowell is supposed to be a better mind than this. It pains me, a lowly blogger, to have to take him on like this -- though it is something of a sweet irony, is it not? He's got all those Ivy League credentials but it doesn't keep him from screwing up and for someone out there in "the real America" to exercise some good old common sense by pointing it out.

Obama so far

Greenwald discusses the course that Obama has been taking during his transition. Present indicators are that Obama, in significant ways, is doing what a very skilled "establishment" politician would be doing. His appointments so far show no catering to the "progressive wing" of his party, but rather something more along the lines of: get the best people he can into the jobs he has to fill. Also in that agenda: Do what looks strategically best to ensure smooth governance (we're grading on a curve on this one), improved re-election chances, create or keep bipartisan bridges, and instill respect both here and around the world. Basically, the idea appears to be: look at what Bush has been doing, realize what he's been doing so badly, and not do that.

There are those who pretty much saw this as a likely outcome of an Obama presidency. The indications are that he aims to govern "to the center." And this actually makes a whole lot of sense whether or not he has leftward ideological leanings: he is as well aware as anyone what he can and cannot do politically and be a viable leader.

In other words, for those who have been paying attention all along, none of this should come as any surprise.

What it also does, is give lie to the ridiculous right-wing hysteria that looked at Obama and saw only Ayers and Wright and Saul Alinsky. Think of the screwed-up anti-epistemology it takes to look out on the world and see only that.

Greenwald and/or Sullivan do seem to want to take a stand against certain figures, such as John Brennan, for what they see as an apologist for Bushian torture. The quotations that Sullivan provides from Brennan look ominous but at the same time I don't see them establishing his case. Consider that while Brennan may have slithered this way or that on Bushian torture policy, it is not under George W. Bush that he would be heading the CIA. It would be under Barack Obama, and the buck stops there. If Obama says "no torture," what exactly does it matter that Brennan was sliming this way and that for someone else? Sure, it's pure politics for an appointee to play fast and loose with principles, to placate one administration and then the next. Brennan didn't want to take a clear stand on anything, including a stand against Bushian torture. Now what? All that matters is that, whatever over-stepping beyond the bounds of decency (even by political standards) some prior administration did, Obama puts a stop to it. Appointing Brennan is no "sign that things won't change from the way Bush did things" because Brennan won't be deciding whether there will be torture.

Here's the great thing that progressives and lefties can get from Obama, among other things: no kowtowing to the anti-intellectual, anti-enlightenment, anti-reason Right, no stupid and incompetent policymaking decisions based on Kristolian ideology or Rovian inhumanity, no Alberto Gonzalez, and no Dick Cheney. In other words, someone who is not going to govern the way George W. Bush did. With the Palin selection and a host of other follies, what might we have expected from McCain?